Saturday, November 17, 2007

I want to tell you about a forgery. The forgers intended to incite hatred against Jews and the state of Israel and to a great extent, they have succeeded. The forgery is a 55-second film clip that purports to show the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy at a Gaza crossroads after a Palestinian irregular attack on an Israeli blockhouse. The clip was broadcast on France's TV 2 on Sept. 30, 2000, and narrated by one of France's best known television journalists, Charles Enderlin. The boy -- his name given as Mohammad al-Dura -- immediately became a global symbol of Israeli brutality, a Palestinian pieta.

When a Palestinian mob ripped apart the bodies of two Israeli reservists in October, 2000, they did so to chants of "Revenge for the blood of al-Dura!" In the Islamic world, the shooting of al-Dura has become the archetypical Israeli atrocity, for which no reprisal can be too horrific. Al-Dura's prone body appears in rock videos, in television sermons, even on an Egyptian postage stamp. Yet evidence has been gathering for years that the al-Dura shooting was entirely staged.

-The 55-seconds are not a continuous sequence, but are made up of six distinct pieces, crudely spliced together.

-There is no shot of the boy actually being hit, nor is there any sign of blood. Nor does the father make any move toward his son.

-The crowd in the background cries out that the boy is dead before he falls over. Although the boy was supposed to have been hit in the stomach, his hands are shown covering his eyes.

-Video of the incident taken by other photographers shows passersby walking unconcernedly between the crouching al-Duras and the Israeli post from which the bullets were supposedly fired.

-Video taken by other photographers shows a cameraman crouching behind the man and boy.

-Although TV2 claims to have 27 minutes of raw footage of the shooting, it has persistently refused to make that footage available to the public. Even now, with the matter in litigation, TV2 has failed to provide the courts with the raw material from which its broadcast clip was assembled.